Tag Archives: donottrack

Just read an article on BBC News that starts of with the AdBlock Plus team winning another case in a German court (yeay) and ended with a report on how Firefox also has built-in tracking protection which -for now- is off by default and is somewhat hidden. To enable it, just open about:config and set privacy.trackingprotection.enabled to true. I disabled Ghostery for now, let’s see how how things go from here.

privacy.donottrackheader.enabled: set to “false” (default) or “true”, which gently asks sites not to track you

Setting “network.cookie.thirdparty.sessionOnly” to “true” is a low-impact change which should stop tracking-companies (think Media6degrees or Quantcast) from following you around the web.

If you want to stop Facebook, Google & Co to stop tracking you around the web as well, the above setting will not suffice. You should either log out of their sites as soon as you’ve done your business there or set “network.cookie.cookieBehavior” to “1” (which will break their “social widgets”). Or you can install Ghostery or NoScript, off course.

I’ve contacted the developer (Pat’s a swell guy, really) and he answered he would look into honoring the DoNotTrack header, which he wrote he’d love to include in Q1 somewhere. In the mean time, if you have AddToAny on your site, you can already hide the Lockerz “Earn” tab. And if you’re on WordPress, you could install (or upgrade) WP DoNotTrack, which I’ve updated to stop the Lockerz tracking (make sure lockerz.com is your blacklist).

If there’s a Drupalista out there that uses AddToAny and would like to stop Lockerz tracking; I’d be happy to co-author a Drupal DoNotTrack module, do get in touch!

8 minor and 3 major releases (from 0.6.5 to 0.9.4), introducing support for features such as audio-only YouTube, embedding playlists, changing player size on the fly and translations in 6 languages (thankstothosesixgreatcontributors).

48260 downloads

Main goal for 2012: stabilize and reach the magic 1.0.0 (which will probably include an optimized initialization-mechanism)

you can now choose between a blacklist and whitelist-approach (previous version did blacklisting only)

define what exactly is in that black- or whitelist (previous version came with a hardcoded blacklist)

option to block javascript-initiated tracking code from being added for all your visitors, or just those that explicitly opted out of tracking in their browser (supported in MS IE9 and Firefox 9, not supported in Google Chrome)

and off course an option-page under wp-admin to change all these settings

Because of these new features (4 of them) and because I think the plugin is already at least 50% mature, I decided to bump the version from 0.1.0 to 0.5.0. Never been good at math anyway …

If you encounter any problems when installing or configuring this plugin, you might find valuable info in the FAQ. But here’s two tips anyway:

In general caching and js-aggregating plugins can interfere, so you might want to disable those while working on your WP DoNotTrack configuration and re-enable (with cleared caches) once you’re satisfied with the result.

If you’re running WP YouTube Lyte with the bonus “donottrack” feature activated, you’ll want to deactivate that before installing/ activating WP DoNotTrack. If you don’t do that, you’ll have to turn to the FAQ …

Don’t hesitate to contact me or leave a comment beneath this here little blogpost if you run into problems, if have a feature request or if you just want to chat a little. I just love receiving feedback!

After almost a year of tinkering with my Donottrack-plugin for WordPress, I’ve requested it to be hosted in the WordPress repositories and uploaded version 0.1.0. So if you’re using Donottrack on your blog, or if you activated this “bonus feature” of WP YouTube Lyte, I propose you give WP DoNotTrack a try and let me know what gives here in the comments or via the contact form?

From the readme:

WP DoNotTrack stops plugins and themes from adding 3rd party tracking code to your blog to protect your visitor’s privacy. WP DoNotTrack uses (a slightly modified) version of jQuery AOP to catch and inspect elements that are about to be added to the DOM and renders these harmless if the black- or whitelist says so.

The current version is blacklist-based and stops tracking by media6degrees and quantserve. This can easily be changed in the javascript though. Future versions will include a WordPress admin-page to change these settings.